In the dappled shade – yes, it was that rare event, a sunny day – of a woodland glade in a London park, the fledgling Shadwell Opera showed anyone who may doubt it that opera in the UK has a bright future. Their performance of Britten's Albert Herring, fresh, touching and assured, was the conclusion of a tour which started in mid-June, the moment many of these youthful musicians put pens down on final exams and launched themselves into the world.

Hosted by Opera Holland Park, which has discreetly assumed a responsibility for nurturing new talent, this Herring was pure pleasure. If you can say that after sitting on a wafer-thin cushion on hard ground for three hours, it must be true. Jack Furness's production made ingenious use of the green backdrop but always honoured both a deceptively complex score and Eric Crozier's libretto after Maupassant. Albert, still wet behind the ears, is chosen as May king in the absence of a sufficiently chaste girl to be queen.

Shadwell Opera, founded two years ago by Furness and Elly Brindle, has brave intentions. Their aim is to mount cutting-edge performances of complete works with full orchestra at affordable prices. There is no attempt to make things easy. One sentence in their blurb stands out: "We don't believe you can market opera to new generations under false guises." It's easy to guess where their barbs are pointing. A promotional flyer on my desk for Don Giovanni from a top company promises "a white-knuckle roller-coaster ride". It hadn't occurred to me that roller-coaster rides were on a par with the great artistic masterpieces of the western canon but you live and learn.

Most of the cast were students together at Cambridge. Every generation or so, a particularly gilded group emerges which you sense will infiltrate and shape the musical future. It's easy to spot it in comedy and theatre. In music nothing has quite matched that time in the 1960s when John Eliot Gardiner founded the Monteverdi Choir and a group of his contemporaries set up the London Sinfonietta. These two groups changed the concert landscape. We are all still beneficiaries.

An element of privilege, and the confidence that goes with it, may play its part. That's unanswerable here. All that matters is the quality. Britten's 1947 opera is an ideal vehicle for the light-voiced Sam Furness, who sang Herring and has all the makings of a star in the English tenor tradition. Aptly endowed with a Fishmonger's Trust Fund scholarship for studies at the Royal Academy of Music, he is a natural comic actor, capable of inspiring pathos too. With his brother as director and his sister, Pollyanna, singing the cameo role of Harry, this is quite some family.

Momentary falters aside, every voice in the ensemble carried easily in the open air. All deserve mention. Here, squeezed by space, are a few: Anna Harvey's deliciously fussy Mrs Herring; Isabella Gage's throaty, gracious Lady Billows; Maud Millar silvery-voiced and witty as the irritatingly prim schoolmistress Miss Wordsworth. Amy Lyddon, still only 19, was a warmly expressive Nancy. The men were all good. Gareth John's rugged, eloquent Sid stood out.

The chamber orchestra specified by Britten makes soloists of everyone. None was found wanting. Horn fanfares, sultry woodwind and solo strings sounded as if designed for al fresco performance. Deftly conducted by Christopher Stark, this was a virtuoso team. Next year: The Turn of the Screw.

The BBC Proms settled into its second week with an array of solidly good concerts. That sounds pedestrian but is high praise. As part of the Sunday choral series, Semyon Bychkov conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, the BBC National Chorus of Wales and the London Philharmonic Choir in a hellfire account of Verdi's Requiem, iconoclastic Italian Catholicism graced with Russo-Jewish intensity. The Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja and the great Verdian bass, Ferruccio Furlanetto, were on golden form, as were the BBCSO, the brass section in particular. In the "Dies Irae" the massed choirs sang out thrillingly and the bass drum thumped and thudded inexorably towards a grisly Day of Judgment.

More BBC forces, this time the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under the baton of Thierry Fischer, gave a robust and enjoyable concert of Berlioz, Fauré and the complete version of Stravinsky's Firebird. If tepid at first, their performance of this 1910 ballet grew to an incandescent climax.

The UK premiere of a work by the French composer Pascal Dusapin (b 1955) offered a challenging centrepiece. Its complicated title – String Quartet No 6 "Hinterland" ("Hapax" for string quartet and orchestra) – certainly tells you what you're getting, namely a piece for orchestra and four strings, here the indefatigable Arditti Quartet.

To include the word "Hapax", meaning a one-off, might be considered a jot superfluous. Who in their right minds would try this costly combination a second time? Not that it wasn't interesting. The two sound worlds offset each another, opening with high string harmonics from the quartet while the orchestra played a quirky, brittle, attractively tipsy accompaniment. Merging and staying discrete, the players embroidered patterns around the same few limited notes to austere effect. On first hearing, 23 minutes was too long. But Dusapin, as his spaciously radiant Morning in Long Island premiered at the Proms a fortnight ago showed, has a singular voice. Indeed, you – or rather he – might call him a hapax.

The week's Proms highlight was also the least well attended. Kodály, Bartók and Liszt may not make good box office, but the London Philharmonic Orchestra's programme, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski with customary exactitude, offered some masterly playing. In Bartók's Piano Concerto No 1, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet was a dextrous, percussive soloist as befits this score, less often played than No 3, glitteringly performed by András Schiff and the Hallé under Mark Elder in week one.

Liszt's hour-long Faust Symphony in the version with choir provided large-scale curiosity. Some say it needs pruning. Yet Liszt's visionary meanderings are part of his genius. He is no more or less repetitive than his son-in-law, Wagner, and in this piece you see clearly how these two monster egos fed each other's creativity. Chromaticisms and tritones crunch together maniacally in the opening movement. Then sweet Gretchen offers a welcome mood shift in an ethereal second, followed by Mephistopheles, diabolical, brash and insidious.

The LPO was on triumphant form, and the strings especially played with precision and attack, with lovely solos from the principal viola. In the final apotheosis, the organ sounds and the "Chorus mysticus" arrives in the burly guise of the men of the London Philharmonic and London Symphony choirs, in virile voice.

The wretched Faust, at long last and naturally, is redeemed by the "Ewig-Weibliche", the Eternal Feminine. Ah, yes, the Eternal Feminine, that metasexist girlfriend of Goethe's enlightenment. Whatever happened to her?